Thank you for Saving Homes for New Yorkers

Thank you. Because of your kindness, thousands of New Yorkers are celebrating the safety of home this Thanksgiving holiday, and all year long.

By supporting our Save Homes Campaign, you were part of providing 5,000 direct services and saving homes for 3,000 New Yorkers this past year alone.

As you may have seen in news reports throughout the year, our city is experiencing record homelessness. I especially thank you for recognizing that homelessness prevention is a key measure in solving the crisis.

The 4,000 New Yorkers living on city streets, more than 87,000 in NYC shelters and thousands of migrants in need of a safe bed are the most visible signs of our city’s worsening homelessness crisis. The majority (more than two-thirds) of those hurt by homelessness are women and children, many of whom are surviving violence and abuse, and a further 1.1 million of our neighbors, including 350,000 children, are now on the brink of homelessness in the 440,000 NYC households currently in rental arrears.

While the average bill for NYC households in arrears is only $3,300, the cost of shelter for each family, if they lose their homes, would be approximately $100,000. Thus, in addition to directly saving homes last year, your support of The Partnership’s prevention work saved more than $100 million in public spending.

This full picture of NYC homelessness, hence why you support prevention, is one you might share with friends and family if the opportunity arises during your Thanksgiving festivities.

You might explain that the work you support via The Partnership’s Save Homes Campaign is an upstream intervention model that combines housing and crisis assistance with mental health and well-being services to immediately prevent evictions and stabilize New Yorkers to stay in their homes long term.

You could expand to explain that the cost of homelessness doesn’t end with the immediate shelter cost. Typically, each child that goes into shelter misses out, for a time, on access to school, such that more than half of all children in shelter do not graduate high school, putting them on a fast track to the poverty that can put them at risk of homelessness again as adults with their own children. Disruption of this intergenerational homelessness is another impact of your support of prevention.

In short, the most cost effective and humanitarian way to solve homelessness is to stop it before it happens.

Additionally, in the current crisis, preventing even more families from losing their homes and ending up on the front door of the shelter system better equips the City to leverage that life-saving shelter system to protect families who have already lost their homes and support them to be quickly rehoused.

As you look ahead to the holiday season and 2024, consider if you can (and have not already done so), making a year-end donation to our Save Homes Campaign to give the gift of home to more New Yorkers.

And, as you catch up with friends, neighbors and family over the Thanksgiving weekend, consider inviting them to join you in supporting homelessness prevention, as their own annual charitable donation or as a means of giving unique and meaningful holiday gifts to others in their lives. Let them know that they can make a gift and donate to the Save Homes Campaign.

Every donation of every size to The Partnership makes a difference in keeping our city neighbors safely housed. Thank you for doing what you can to save homes for New Yorkers.

Happy Thanksgiving.